Daily Bull 2.19.18: The Parody Accounts Must Be Stopped

Impermissible benefits be damned. Pay the players whatever the market demands. Burner cellphones for all. I want to know when the NCAA is going to crack down on the true enemy of a peaceful college football community: the parody account.

We’ve all been there. Just scrolling laconically through the feeds, checking for anything noteworthy among the usual detritus of garbage that Twitter feeds us, when something so egregious and appalling jumps out at you that it takes your breath away.

“@2ManyBrewsters has followed you”

Could...could that be real? Did someone actually go to the trouble of creating this account while imagining it would be a good idea?

They did indeed.

TimHadTooManyBrewsters didn’t do anything particularly unsavory. This just happened to be the straw that spurred us to share these thoughts this morning. We know nothing about this account, apart from the fact that its top tweet is recruiting smack and that the name is dad-humour wordplay that would make even a network sitcom writer cringe. (These two facts are all you need to know, really.) Truth is, we don’t want to know anything more about this account, because to even pursue or engage it in any way would simply encourage its creator, which is a dangerous path to set upon.

There are approximately five good parody accounts on Twitter at any given moment. They are timely, they are subtle, and they have carefully-cultivated personas that are maintained diligently over a period of years with a total commitment to the bit. For every one of these gems, there are approximately seventeen million miserable failures such as this: a half-hearted attempt at a clever name that tries to batter you with some Jeff Dunham brand of comedy, but ultimately ends up just tweeting the exact same incoherent and juvenile thoughts of its creator. They’re not unique personalities, they’re just extensions of the unoriginal and uninteresting personas of the perpetrators.

If you see one of these, just run. Ignore it and let it it fizzle out and extinguish like the dud firecrackers that they are. Twitter is bad enough without duplicates of the most attention-desperate floating around.